雪中的石冢

Friedrich painted this around 1807, among his first works in oil after years of drawing, and in one of Prussia's darkest moments, with Napoleon's armies newly spread across the German states. He set an ancient stone grave, a Neolithic dolmen he had sketched near Gutzkow on the Baltic coast, among three bare oaks in deep snow. Two of the trees are snapped off and the third bends away from the wind. A few ravens perch in the branches and over the stones. For Friedrich and his circle these prehistoric tombs stood for a deep native past, which gave the frozen scene a patriotic charge in a year of defeat. The real dolmen was pulled apart and gone by 1818, so it survives now mainly in pictures like this.